Decolonizing Russian Cosmism

“As a term, ‘Russian cosmism’ exemplifies one of the key paradoxes of the Russian culture: it ‘wants’ to denote something globally significant and at the same time to retain its national and colonial character”

“Should Russian cosmism, a rather incoherent succession of thinkers, be seen in a historical perspective, as a thing of its time—and is it, indeed, a thing, an object in Graham Harman’s sense of the word? Or is it possible to deconstruct the term ‘Russian cosmism,’ to perform a kind of phenomenological reduction that would reveal its profoundly buried core or the lack of it?”

“As there are no other national forms of cosmism, what might be behind the perceived need to designate the vast intellectual discourse as ‘Russian?’”

“Coupled with the highly specific term ‘cosmism,’ it becomes heavily loaded stylistically and is therefore much less neutral than such combinations as ‘Russian language’ or even ‘German classical philosophy.’”

“One can only imagine if the analytical philosophical tradition were known as ‘Anglo-Saxon Panlogism.’”

“One could say that to resolve this binary opposition, the Russian element should have poured out itself and dissolved into the cosmos; on the other hand, cosmisity should have permeated and transformed the whole of ‘the Russian soul.’ Instead, we have two hybrid entities, two centaurs stuck mid-way in their rapprochement”

“As a result, ‘Russian cosmism’ is functioning more like a cultural brand, based on the term invented in the late 1960s to highlight Fedorov’s influence on Tsiolkovsky and later expanded to include a wide range of loosely related thinkers”

“The project I am writing this text for is a commendable attempt to internationalize the cosmist discourse and disentangle it from toxic associations with Russian nationalism”

“Yet it cannot simply be undone by re-wiring it to the Deleuzian material ontology or inviting former and modern colonial ‘Others’ to read out or comment on cosmist texts”

“The subject requires not only a phenomenological (or existential) reduction but also a thorough decolonization that will presuppose a radical shift of attention”

“all possible cosmisms”

“a much greater number of members and subsets because it includes all human (and possibly non-human) theories about the cosmos, not only those labelled ‘cosmist.’”

“no project about Russian cosmism can now avoid its moral responsibility for the use of rockets in the war in Ukraine, which was made possible only as a result of the uncritically eulogized Soviet space exploration program”

“Figuratively speaking, every missile hitting Kyiv, Kharkiv, or Lviv, has the name of Tsiolkovsky engraved on it”

“These ideas may then be observed in their own ‘habitat’ on the mental plane where they have their own qualities and associations irreducible to any historical, cultural, or personal context”

“David Lynch has famously compared the process to catching fish: “Ideas are so beautiful and they’re so abstract. And they do exist someplace. … I believe that if you sit quietly, like you’re fishing, you will catch ideas. The real, you know, beautiful, big ones swim kinda deep down there so you have to be very quiet, and you know, wait for them to come along.””